One of the biggest questions in investing is how to decide which companies to back. While a case can be made for investing in start-ups with path-breaking new products, many venture capitalists put a greater emphasis on the accomplishments and prospects of a start-up’s team.

That approach makes sense, if for no other reason that many start-ups change their mind about how they are going to make money. And a team that has been successful in the past is likely to handle such pivots with greater skill than one that has never had any previous start-up wins.

On February 26, a new start-up -- Colabo -- launched with the goal of helping marketers boost sales of new products. Angel investors are betting on Colabo's team after its previous start-up turned $7 million in capital into a $70 million exit in two years during the 2008 financial crisis.

Colabo seems to be targeting a market that's now small. Its software ties together public reaction to a new product -- such as Twitter and Facebook posts -- and, say, internal sales or web site tracking data, so that marketers can adjust their campaigns with less delay in response to market feedback.

As Mr. Dembak and Ms. Halperin explained in a March 1 interview, the three started working together in 1999. They left Gilian Technologies to co-found B-hive Networks -- a start-up that used data to track and monitor server use. Mr. Dembak handled sales and marketing, Ms. Halperin managed Finance, HR and Operations, and Mr. Wexler developed the technology.

They left to start B-hive because they thought they could outdo Gilian. As Mr. Dembak said, "Start-ups are binary. Either everyone is busy pursuing the same goal or they're busy covering themselves to make sure they don't get blamed because the start-up is going nowhere. The founders had left their imploding creation, and we decided that was not where we wanted to be."

Mr. Dembak trusts his co-founders -- revealing an important idea about how to build an effective start-up team. If co-founders have overlapping responsibilities, then they may spend too much time fighting internal turf battles instead of working together to achieve a shared objective.

Mr. Dembak believes that Colabo has solved this problem. He thinks that Colabo has a clear division of responsibilities -- e.g., sales, product, and operations -- among its co-founders. According to Dembak, "All the bases are covered and nobody wastes time worrying that the others are working behind the scenes to undermine them."

B-Hive was founded to solve a communication problem in big companies. People in charge of IT thought that if the company's systems were working, they were doing a great job. But managers were frustrated with IT because the applications running on the systems did not meet their business needs.

As Mr. Dembak and Ms. Halperin explained, "B-hive built a bridge between the two with software that explained how IT looked from the users' perspective. We raised a $7 million Series A round in 2006 and in July 2008 -- as the financial crisis was peaking -- we sold to VMware for $70 million."

The three left VMware in late 2010 and are building Colabo with investments from former VMware CEO and current Chief Strategist at EMC, Paul Maritz, and VMware’s EVP of Cloud Infrastructure, Raghu Raghuram. Colabo's customers include VMware, McAfee, and Hollywood PR agency, id-pr.

Colabo believes that its co-founders are in a better position now than they were when they started B-hive. With Colabo, they have the benefit of knowing what top WMware executives think the world will look like in the next five years. When they started B-hive, they just knew there was a problem that made the lives of lower level executives more difficult.

One advantage of knowing what top management thinks is that Dembak believes that big companies like WMware or competitors like Oracle and Salesforce.com will not try to copy their product until the market gets much bigger. So they "might invest in [products that compete with Colabo] in two or three years," said Mr. Dembak.

And Colabo's co-founders believe -- based on observing how big companies operate -- that their start-up will be able to adapt more quickly in the event of an unexpected boost in demand for a new technology -- such as when the iPad took market share from netbooks.

Colabo's co-founders are operating with their own capital and that of the aforementioned angel investors. And Mr. Dembak and Ms. Halperin believe that it will beat competitors like Oracle and Salesforce due to its lean operations (it outsources some coding to oDesk) and greater nimbleness. The team aims to close deals quickly by offering pricing that requires no up-front investment and quick installation.

While Colabo's team has divided up its responsibilities well, I am not sure it has targeted a market that will get big enough to yield an attractive return for its investors.

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